


Necessary Atrocities

by EtincelleDOR



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Canon Compliant, F/M, Post-Season/Series 06
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-20
Updated: 2018-11-20
Packaged: 2019-08-26 17:33:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,863
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16686022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EtincelleDOR/pseuds/EtincelleDOR
Summary: In which Lotor and Allura are determined to hate each other.Post Season Six





	Necessary Atrocities

“Are you alright?” 

Honestly, Allura feels like she has been hit by a cargobus. 

The slightly damp undergrowth of leaves and shoots prickle at the back of her neck. She opens her eyes, and she is staring up at the stars. A supernova rages deep in the distance, thousands of light-years away from here. They sky is tinged pink and like her, the earth beneath her is basking in its warmth. 

Pulling herself into a sitting position, Allura looks out over the canyon. Nothing had ever filled her with such elation in her life. She could feel the life of the planet thrumming beneath her, its people, her people, creatures, even its plants, all alive and thriving. This is what her power was for, she was sure of it. She crunches fistfuls of undergrowth in her hands, a wide grin peppering itself over her face. 

“Yes.” She says. She feels a light brushing against her hand, and a gentle flow of replenishing energy enter her. Her hand twitches beneath his. He has broken out of his restraints, she notes bitterly, the cuffs scattered on the ground a few feet away. He may have caught her, but it was impossible to tell. “You don’t need to give me your energy.” She snaps, “I’m fine.” 

Lotor is kneeling by her side, his marks glowing brightly as he channels what quintessence he has. “You cannot do this at your own expense.” He says sternly, “Believe me, I’ve tried.” 

But the last thing Allura was prepared to do at this particular moment was to believe Lotor. 

“When we left the Atlas I believe that diplomatic silence was what we agreed upon.” 

Lotor sets his jaw and glares at her through narrow eyes, but doesn’t argue. She feels him remove his hand from hers, and he looks away in something akin to shame, his energy melancholy in its retreat as he turns his head to the makeshift world in front of him. 

This was the first thing she had insisted on, when Lotor was pulled from the Rift, lifeless and barely breathing. If there was one thing he had that was worth anything to her now, it was the coordinates to the Altean colony he had founded. 

She had watched him for quintants from behind thickened glass, the clinical lighting stinging her eyes as the fragile body of the man she had loved contorted in agony. She had believed him with all her being, even though in hindsight it had been the most stupid thing in the universe any of them could have done. Yet for all her intuition, she had genuinely believed he was driven by a desire for peace. She watched while he manically ranted and raved gibberish until the very effort exhausted him, and still as he fell into a catatonic slumber that had made him look almost peaceful, a small smile drifting across his face, and a tear falling down his cheek as he slept. 

Attempts to communicate with him had been futile, as had attempts to sedate or restrain him. All the while, the only clear words he uttered in the Galra language as he rocked in the corner of the cell resounded in her head. 

_“I am not my father. I am not my father. I am not my father.”_

Healing him had been a means to an end, speaking to him had been too painful. Allura had had her fair share of suitors over the years. All of them wanted something from her, one after another. If it wasn’t her power, it was her beauty. Lotor wanted nothing from her. Or so she had thought. And while his chivalry had been quite unnecessary, it had been pleasant to behold. He had just wanted the power he needed to defeat them, and had been willing to pretend he loved her to get it. 

How could she have been so foolish? 

Just the thought made her skin crawl. So much for the world leader she was supposed to be. Her people and all of the Coalition looked to her for the strength they needed in the face of the Galra oppression, and yet her biggest enemy had manipulated her like a puppet on string. He might have betrayed her, that she could overcome, in time. But it was the stupidity in which she had betrayed all of them that cut her so deeply. Behind the closed doors of her suite, Allura had buried her face in crooks of her arms, only glad that her parents weren’t alive to bear the shame. Her anger boiled over into tears, anguish and smashed trinkets thrown where no one would hear it. 

And yet, the thought of not doing it alone, had once been so comforting. 

Her comparison of his father to him that day had hurt him profoundly. It had meant to. She didn’t regret those words, not even now. Some part of her wondered if she hadn’t said them, whether or not he would have stood down, whether they could have talked it out. He implied he would spare her. Perhaps she wasn’t the only fool in this enterprise after all. 

This is an Ataraxian moon, one of many thousands in the Desdari System within the Quantum Abyss. So far from anyone and anything and so fully lacking in Quintessence that it wasn’t even deemed worth mining by the Galra, and completely untouched by the politics of the outside world. Allura wasn’t even sure by memory alone which race or region these planets and their moons belonged to, only that many years ago, they had been used as military weapon testing sites by a long extinct race. Nothing of any importance was capable of life here, despite the agreeable atmospheric gas composure. She supposed its rich plant life made her a little reminiscent of Altea, but that was all. 

Allura had explicitly told Lotor not to speak to her during this mission, unless spoken to. It was a request he heeded until now. Having left him to die in the Rift, Lotor was only too happy to oblige. Only when she announced her intention to restore it did he raise his voice, his fists curling behind his back, telling her it wasn’t safe, and that no single person could possibly replenish it in its entirety. 

She had ignored him, of course, and done it anyway. 

They both pause, staring into the abyss of beauty. Lotor is frozen in place beside her, his breath stolen by the life before his eyes. “It’s not dying anymore…” he murmurs, a smile breaking onto his face prompting him to disregard her request for silence as the new lease of life washing over the planet and through them both. “You did it…” 

“I never thought I would see anything like this again.” She says, wiping a tear from her eye. “It’s, incredible.” 

Her tears strike an uncomfortable chord in him, and Lotor calmly swallows the urge to comfort her. “Nor I…” he murmurs. He has always known that her power was beyond his comprehension, but to see it in its entirety was something he was sure he would never see. He bows his head in deference, “My Queen.” 

He supposed she was now, their rightful queen. They deserved a strong, inspiring ruler, rather than the miserable failure he had turned out to be, and a small part of him felt a little like some of his destiny had been completed by bringing her here, if not in the way he had planned. It had been on the tip of his tongue several times, but she would have hated him, she did hate him, and he couldn’t process just how much that destroyed him. 

His words surprise her, and she is vaguely aware of birds singing in the distances as her brain desperately searches for the best response. To Allura, it seems that all false pretences have fallen away between them, and she cannot help but feel a sense of relief. She is too exhausted now to be angry at him, and it would be a waste of her energy anyway. She lets her tiredness carry her downwards until her back meets the ground again, coaxing out the questions she had previously considered herself too furious to ask.

“Why did you do it?” 

Lotor frowns, his eyes fixated ahead of him because he cannot bear to look at her. “To which of my crimes are you referring?” 

“You didn’t have to murder them.” 

“I had to supply the planet with Quintessence, this was the only way.” He says, the calmness of his voice repulsive to her, “The alternative was their slow and agonising demise. All of them. I sacrificed the few to save the many, Allura. I had no other choice.” 

“The Galra mine Quintessence by the vat-load, from hundreds of occupied labour planets, its fleet alone burns gallons of it by the phoeb, and you’re telling me _that_ , was the only way?” 

A chilled silence falls in between them, tainted with a sour mixture of the disappointment that she couldn’t conceal from him and the impenitence he was unable to resent. Lotor had been forced to learn many things over his lifetime. His twisted upbringing had desensitised him to his own pain, and taught him the value of dishonesty, but it was the destruction of Kaelentis, the planet he had only wanted to rule fairly, burning before his eyes that had finally broken his will. From then on, Lotor knew that he would have to make the decisions no one else could, if he wanted to survive under his father’s rule. Lying came easily, as did manipulation. Once he could kill and not allow himself to care, suddenly he had thrived. So to sacrifice some Alteans to save the rest, had been an easy choice. A terrible, unforgivable, easy choice that Allura was lucky enough not to understand. It wasn’t as if he had allowed any of them to suffer. 

“My father would have destroyed every last one of them if he had ever found out I was stealing from our ships’ fuel supplies.” He says. He intends to put fire into his words, to hiss at her to try and make her understand, but like her, he is depleted of his will to fight anymore, and his words fall from his lips cold and sombre. “So, yes. It was.” 

“I couldn’t do that.” She whispers, “I couldn’t do what you did, Lotor. I couldn’t, pick and choose who lives and who dies.” 

“And yet you and your team have shot down hundreds of our ships.” He spits, “None of them were manned solely by sentries.” 

“ _How dare you_ …” Allura closes her eyes, and forces herself to count to ten. The Galra shot first. Almost always. They were at war, after all. But yes, she had killed. And never truly regretted it. 

He holds out a palm as if to deflect her response, his hair blowing gently in the breeze behind him, “I find myself capable of multiple atrocities, when necessity expects it of me. Don’t you?” 

“Lotor…” she says, swallowing the lump in her throat. “Why didn’t you just tell me about this place? I could have helped you. Instead of, pretending to love me.” 

“I have never pretended to love you!” He snaps. It hurt him even now to say it, but if he didn’t tell her now, he might never have the opportunity again. She was the only being in the universe that had ever seen anything other than congenital evil in him. He had fought his feelings for her for a long time before he had embraced them. After all, they were hardly called for. That another could care for him in such a way was so utterly foreign that it had caught him off-guard, and he had found himself craving it. At some point, he couldn’t remember when, he even started to believe his own lies. Lotor couldn’t remember a time when he had been as happy as he had been with her - beautiful memories of the Rift as the Quintessence teased out their feelings and wove them together, shattered like glass by a swift stroke of reality. He wanted to cling to her love and her trust and never let them go. But it would had been foolish to believe that fantasy could last, that she could love him when she knew what he had done. He could forsake everyone else, if he had to, but not her. The shallow resounding truths in her words were like a knife had been plunged into him, twisted, wrenched, and a hole carved out of him. And he had _hated_ her for it. 

“I knew you wouldn’t love me once you knew my past.” He says, “I couldn’t tell you. So I prolonged the inevitable.” She flinches. ‘Who for?’, she thought. He clearly hadn’t paid much attention to how she might feel about being strung along. All of this was simply too much to process. “Aren’t you tired?” she asks him, holding out her palms to him, “Of all of this?” 

His initial defensiveness seemed to ease a little. “A little, yes.” 

Allura closes her eyes and hears him lie down next to her. Part of her wants to march him back to the ship and give him back to his jail cell, the other, wants to lie beside him until the sun comes up again. 

“What will happen to me?” He asks. 

“I… I don’t know.” She says, “It isn’t, just my decision.” 

Plenty among the Coalition would vote for his death, she was certain, and that nauseated her from the inside out. It had been considered only fair to open the floor to the leaders of the planets enslaved by the Galra, not even she could deny that. Even if that meant he would ultimately pay for his father’s war crimes. True freedom would never again be an option for him. It would be permanent house arrest at least. 

“Are they looking after you?” She had given orders, somewhat halfheartedly, to that effect, she supposed. His brow creases in soft surprise, and he nods silently, his hands resting unsurely across his abdomen. 

“It seems I may be reunited with my father sooner than I had first thought...” 

“I will not allow that.” She interrupts curtly, “We must be above killing if we are to be a peaceful civilisa...” 

“Allura. You introduced democracy to the Coalition. You must be content with the decision.” 

“Well I’m not content for you to die.” She frowns, “I’ve been to too much trouble to get here.” 

“You seemed content for me to die in the Rift.” 

She twitches. There was no question about it, Lotor had suffered immeasurably in the Rift. The Quintessence had mutilated him in body and mind beyond compatibility with life, yet rendered him entirely unable to die. Allura’s magic had spared his humanity, but not even she could take the memories away. At first Allura’s anger had blinded her, but face to face with him now, and she felt a horrible pang of guilt in her stomach. 

Suddenly she realises that their hands are touching, their fingers starting to intertwine like so many times before, and she cannot bring herself to let him go. She can hear his breathing deepen ever so slightly, he wasn’t drawing back either. Loving and hating someone simultaneously wasn’t a notion either of them was familiar with. His thumb strokes the back of her hand tenderly. 

She sighs softly. “I really don’t have words to describe how much I hate you right now.” 

Lotor feels her grip on his hand tighten, just a fraction, but just enough to coax a discreet smile from his lips. “Neither do I.”

  


* * *

  


Lotor wakes with a start, her hand still clasped in his. It was still dark, the hint of the supernova just peeking over the horizon. The last he remembered they had been staring up at the Abyss constellations, not saying another word to each other. His body aches against the hard ground - he must have fallen asleep. Allura sleeps peacefully beside him, her breath condensing steadily in the night air. They were close, so close he could feel the warmth radiating from her body, her other hand is holding his bicep loosely, her head leaning against his shoulder. For a short moment, he closes his eyes, and tries to tell himself this isn’t what he wants.

_No._ His face twists in a pained grimace. He has to go. He may never have another chance to escape, and the Coalition weren’t likely to be letting him out early for good behaviour. He hasn’t a chance in Hell of escaping the Atlas, especially not an Altean alchemist, he has spent enough years trying to get away from the witch to know. If he wants his freedom, it has to be now.    

Reluctantly, Lotor untangles himself from her, and leaning down, presses a single kiss to her forehead.  

“ _I love you_ …” he whispers, “ _I will make this right. I promise_.”  

Because if there's one thing he knows, it's that he's not ready to give up yet. 

  



End file.
